


Dandelion Roots

by AdamantSteve



Series: WIP Amnesty/FicDump [8]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Grief, M/M, Missing Persons, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 01:52:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1492345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdamantSteve/pseuds/AdamantSteve
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint goes missing in the aftermath of the Battle of New York. Phil decides to find him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dandelion Roots

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: **this story is unfinished and unbetaed**.The end of the fic has a list of what happens after the events detailed in the story.

" _Barton_? Barney _Barton_?" Phil looked up from the file incredulously. Natasha shrugged with resignation. "I don't know what to tell you, Phil. He never mentioned a brother to me. But he certainly looks like him."

Phil flipped through the papers again to look at the ID photos and surveillance shots. He didn't take his eyes off the man's profile - identical to Clint's - as he spoke. "Where is he?" 

"He's in holding."

"Did you talk to him?" Phil closed the file and stood, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair and walking alongside Natasha to the door. 

"Not yet. I wanted to get your input first. I thought you might have heard of him."

"No." Phil shook his head as he locked his door behind them. 

 

-

 

The man sitting in holding had some of the same demeanour of Clint's, the same way of draping himself across a chair which looked like it took more effort than it was worth. They watched him through the mirrored glass as another agent asked him who he was and why he was there. He seemed pissed off and confused. Phil could relate. 

 

"Do you know why you're here?" Phil asked. A good opener for such interrogations. 

"You tell me, man. I got picked up for accidentally shoplifting on my first day in New York and get dragged here? You gotta be fucking kidding me!"

"The city of New York takes crime very seriously, Mr..."

" _Barton_. C'mon I have to have told you people my name like nine times already!" 

"My apologies. So how come you're in New York then, Mr Barton?" It felt strange to use that name on someone else, especially after so long.

"Figured I'd come see my little brother. Last I heard he'd hit the big time. Figured he'd be good for a place to sleep, atleast until he fucks it all up again."

Phil maintained his mildly interested demeanour and hoped his tells weren't too obvious. His palms were sweating.

 

"And who's your brother?"

"Clint. Clinton Francis Barton. I fucking told the last guy this. I gave him a number to call. Look I gave the sunglasses back alright? I'm sorry. I'll pay for it, I'll leave the city, whatever."

 

"Mr Barton, the reason you've been brought here is because Clint Barton has been missing for five months. If he is your brother as you claim, then it's reasonable to assume you may have information that may prove useful to our investigation into where he might be."

The man scoffed. "He owe someone money? Great. Listen _I_ don't have any, I'm broke. I can't give you shit."

 

\--

 

The phone number proved fruitless. It was a number Phil didn't recognize, and Natasha seemed similarly nonplussed. It was a dead line. 

 

\--

 

Natasha went in next, and Phil watched her through the glass. 

 

In the months Clint had been gone, since the Chitauri invasion and it's mostly-finished clean up, Phil hadn't given up hope that he'd track him down. The last anyone had seen of him was outside some restaurant when he said he'd walk back to the tower for drinks and debrief. Since then, from a hospital bed, Phil had pored over hours of CCTV footage from the cameras that still stood around the city. 

 

Phil had gone through the footage of the Greyhound station's cameras to see if he could see Clint anywhere, but no joy was had. Once he was able to walk around for longer than ten minutes, he spoke to the ticket office lady who'd been there that night, but she said she didn't remember anyone fitting Clint's description. 

 

"He's a colleague." Phil had answered when people asked who he was. "He's a friend" he'd replied after a few months had passed.

 

There was no joy to be had. The team tried to help in their own ways, Steve particularly had been generous with his time and canvassing, perhaps out of some sense of guilt towards Phil and his dogged quest. None of them tried to talk him out of his increasingly futile looking quest. Natasha was almost as dedicated as him.

 

Phil had only just gone back to SHIELD full time when this Barney character showed up and now here was his best interrogator getting nothing of use out of him. Clint had always been tight lipped about what Phil had gleaned was a bad upbringing, or no upbringing at all, perhaps. There was a record of his name at an orphanage some years earlier but no brother had been mentioned there, nor since, and Clint had certainly never spoken about him. 

 

Phil thought back to that greyhound bus station and the woman's bottle-red hair, permed and stiff, it had looked like something from twenty years out of time. Natasha's beautiful hair was like the real thing in comparison. He snapped out of his reverie by Natasha slamming a palm on the desk. She whispered something he couldn't make out but it made the man handcuffed to the chair swallow and nod. 

 

-

 

"He's an idiot." Natasha spat as she headed back with Phil up to his office with coffee and further notes that the other interrogations had provided. He waited for her to elaborate. She was seething. "That, _that_!? Is Clint’s _brother_? Clint is a thousand times the man that scumbag is. He, he had the audacity to tell me," she pointed at her own chest, "that we were better off without him." Her nostrils flared as she breathed in and out, and not for the first time, Phil was reminded of the Hulk. He unlocked his office door again and they stepped inside. 

 

Phil had known that Clint had been in the circus at one point, and Barney corroborated that. Usefully he mentioned a few, and then a more exhaustive list when pressed, of the places it had visited when the two of them had both been a part of it. Barney had run away again at some point and left Clint there when he was thirteen, which made Phil inwardly frown. It wasn't unusual for assets of SHIELD to have had colourful pasts but Clint's seemed especially lurid, and he had a feeling it would only become more so the more he found out from this brother of his. It was mostly the central states and into the south that the circus had gone, at least while Barney had been a part of it, so Phil began to filter circuses in that area out of the master list he'd compiled weeks ago. 

 

They got a little more information out of him before various laws said he had to be let go since even the shoplifting charges had been mostly debunked. Clint and he had been at an orphanage: St Mary's Home For Boys in Ohio, which had closed not long after Clint would have left it. Barney said they'd run away and subsequently joined the Circus and that he didn't know what happened to clint after that until Barney had sent him a letter some eight years later, on an off chance to an abandoned house they used to sometimes stay in. 

 

Armed with that address, Phil tracked it down but found that the area of slum housing had been demolished a few years ago and a cineplex had been built there instead, so that trail ran dry too.

 

They kept tabs on Barney, but he fell into petty crime and small time gang stuff before getting shot by someone in an alleyway over a trivial deal gone bust. Another trail gone cold, was all Phil could think of it as, as loathsome and uncaring a person as the man had seemed about Clint. His one redeeming quality was that he looked and sounded enough like Clint that it was a human reminder of the person Phil had no real right to be missing so much. 

 

If Phil kept Clint's photo in his wallet, that was because he was dedicated to his job. If he took it out sometimes when he thought no one else was looking that was just to remind himself that he was probably still out there somewhere. 

 

Phil felt guilty. For going along with Fury's plan to 'play dead' even if he had no choice at the time, being unconscious for a week after Loki's spear. Perhaps it wasn't, and it was just Phil's ego filling in the blanks, but Clint disappeared minutes after hearing he'd died, and he thought that if he'd perhaps done things differently, even if the world was in ruins, Clint wouldn't have left. 

 

They had kissed, years ago. Two times, both after missions gone wrong where one of them had been in peril and then made it through. And that was just adrenaline and relief that they were both alive, not anything more, even if Phil had maybe let tendrils of those kisses work their way down to root in his heart. And he thought of those kisses too often, always pushing them away but still there, like dandelion roots that even Loki's spear couldn't dig out of him. If he was honest, it was more than just a missing comrade or a troubled friend, and anyone could see that in his dogged desperation, but he wouldn't admit it to himself and none of the others pushed it either. 

 

Hill tried to tell him once that perhaps he should let it go, or put it on the backburner at least, and Phil had uncharacteristically thrown a pencil at her. But there wasn't anything else to find. 

 

Eventually, he took two weeks vacation and went to the town the orphanage had been in, Sleepy Oaks, Ohio. If he couldn't dredge up anything more, he'd let it go. 

 

\--

 

_Phil tracks Clint down to the town he'd spent some time in as a child. He asks around but can't find him to talk to. Until one night, he finds Clint on a street corner along with some prostitutes. He's working as a hooker-slash-protector of the other hookers. Phil pulls up to talk to him, but Clint has no memory of him or his previous life._

_Phil has to sweet talk Clint, paying him for his time, eventually convincing Clint of his past life, and making Clint confront the grief he felt over Phil's death. Once he does that, his memories come back and he expresses joy and relief that Phil's ok. He comes back to New York and they start dating._

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
